Tension & Release: An Interview with Poet Kevin Clark

Kevin Clark is a poet with music in his blood.  Whether it be jazz, classical, rock and roll, or blues, he’s excited about all of it.  When reading his poems, one can be sure that an old classic is playing somewhere in the background.  Kevin Clark’s Self-Portrait with Expletives won the Pleiades Press contest. His first book In the Evening of No Warning earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets.  His poetry has appeared widely in such journals as The Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Kestrel, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review. His criticism has appeared in many venues, including The Iowa Review, Papers on Language and Literature, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. His poetry writing textbook The Mind’s Eye is published by Pearson Longman. He teaches at Cal Poly and The Rainier Writing Workshop.  See also www.kevinclarkpoet.com.

The following is an interview via email April 2011 between Ephraim Scott Sommers and Kevin Clark.

As you understand it, what is the relationship between popular music and contemporary literature?

You know, I’m often wrestling with Walter Pater’s idea that “all art aspires to the condition of music.” I know what he means; we like non-verbal epiphanic moments in which we “get” something. But life is not an EST session in which we deliberately sit around waiting for “it” to strike us. I don’t buy Pater’s notion… It’s like saying all language aspires to the condition of French. Yeah, well maybe for musicians music is tops… Maybe for the French, language should be theirs alone. It depends on temperament, right?

Here’s the thing: In the big picture, all art is united by a need to create a visceral and intellectual reaction in its audience. Artists want to create two things at once: gut-level feeling and mental action. Good music and good literature do just this─as do successful examples of the other arts. To an extent, music and literature do the same thing, especially music with lyrics.

What kind of music have you been enjoying lately?  Other than those musicians you’ve written about directly, what music has influenced your poetry?

Do you have a month or two? Perhaps a 55 gallon drum of coffee? Because I love this question, the answer could go on and on…

Let me first say that for the last three decades I’ve been listening to jazz primarily, though I still love rock and I listen to classical as well. Very little hip hop, opera or chamber music. As an example of my recent jazz tastes, for my birthday my wife Amy just gave me a Chet Baker and Bill Evans CD recorded over three sessions in 1959. When we first put it on, I was stunned I hadn’t heard it before. It’s lush and complex and inspiring.

But today is April 24, 2011 and to answer your question I’ve just gone to look at the carriages in both of my cd players and here’s what else I found: In the bedroom: Goin’ Home by Archie Shepp and Horace Parlan, For Lovers by Nina Simone, Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones, Haunted Heart by Charlie Haden, and When the Heart Dances by Laurence Hobgood.  In the living room: The Complete Legendary Sessions by Chet Baker and Bill Evans, Ballad Essentials by Scott Hamilton, Demons by The Cowboy Junkies, London Live by Leonard Cohen, and Blessed by Lucinda Williams.

As to the music that influenced me, well, the totality of all the music I’ve listened to is like the totality of all the poetry I’ve read─it makes me aware of the seemingly infinite expanse of the heart. When I was this skinny, white ten-year-old in suburban Jersey, I heard a song that I think was called “Hey Little Blonde Girl” or something like that—and it was rockin’ and I played it over and over on my parents’ 45 record player. It made me want to dance. My parents listened to very little music but I also listened to their platters of South Pacific, the musical they saw in Manhattan before heading out on their honeymoon. “Bali Hai” still kills me. As a teenager I listened to Dave Brubeck’s Take Five album at the same time I listened to Chuck Berry, The Beatles, The Stones, The Shirelles, Smokey Robinson, The Beach Boys, etc. To this day I think “Sally Go Round the Roses” by the Jaynettes is one of the great expressions of the post-war era. Like “Bali Hai” it’s haunting and weird and even today I just love its mystery.

All of which is to say this: Sometimes inside me the raging drive of rock is at war with the sad romance of the ballad… If I’m lucky, the two impulses form a truce that simmers in my work as either hard driving narrative or elegiac lyric.

As you’re well aware, ekphrastic poetry is poetry about another art form.  Ekphrastic poems in your new book Self-Portrait with Expletives are about both sculpture and music. Can poetry about music provide something that poetry about sculpture or painting cannot?  What is the major difference between the two? 

I really appreciate the fact you’ve read the book that closely…but, listen, I don’t think there’s a difference between poems on either subject. We could speculate that poems about music involve more kinetic energy and that poems about sculpture are more about stasis, but when I think of poems such as Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” I just don’t see that kind of difference. It’s the poet’s state of mind that generates the poem’s style, tone, and content.

­─Follow-up question: What ekphrastic poem has influenced your writing the most? Why?

Hands down, Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” High school? Freshman year in college? I remember being nineteen or twenty years old and sitting outside my mother’s house and thinking about that poem and the inexplicably wondrous and dreadful inevitabilities of life. Somehow I connected that poem to my father’s death in 1965 when I was fourteen. My first book was deeply influenced by his death, and in a way Auden’s poem was a part of my training.  His tone is virtually perfect. Unfortunately, the only time I was in Paris the museum was closed and I couldn’t see the painting.

Poetry is a form of art that is often compared to music, how would you describe the “musical quality” of a poem as you understand it? 

Fifty or more years ago poets would answer this question by discussing received forms─rhyme and meter and repetition and how these devices would engender “musical” sound. But for me, all good poems have─by virtue of the musicality of language itself─some degree of sonic resonance. Such character is the instantaneous and ongoing effect of many factors: word choice and colloquialisms, rhythm, repeated sounds (including alliteration and interior rhyme), line length, punctuation, etc.

The poet Marilyn Nelson said that some poets are talkers and some are singers because they either mimic conversational patterns or stress melodic qualities. I write in both styles.

The lyric is the kind of poetry most often associated with music.  How would you define the difference between narrative poetry and lyric poetry? In which direction to you see contemporary poetry heading?

I stick with the traditional definitions here. Both forms convey something about the human condition. The lyric renders the interior life: emotion, internal atmosphere, mental sensation, that kind of thing. The narrative focuses on external events in a way that usually heightens suspense. Both need elements of the other, however. If all you have is emotion without context, you have pabulum; so the lyric needs some semblance of a plot. On the other hand, if you have nothing but plot, your poem is antic and empty; so the narrative needs lyric interludes.

In praise of your narrative style in Self-Portrait with Expletives (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), Martha Collins writes, “These poems raise narrative poetry to a breathtaking new level of pleasure.”  As a narrative poet, how might the narrative construction of your poems be similar to a musical composition?  In what other ways might a narrative poem be musical?

Many musical pieces with or without lyrics present some kind of situation in which a conflict becomes apparent─and then the tension rises and rises to a climax. My poem “Self-Portrait with Expletives” has five sections. In the next to last section, the tension builds to such a climax. I tried to enhance the speaker’s growing urgency through the use of repetition, punchy figures of speech, increasingly shorter phrasing, etc., all factors that contribute to the ongoing effect of sound.

Some musical pieces, often those longer than the typical three minute AM radio hit, have a complex symphonic expression in which all kinds of melodies are presented before they return in a kind of coalescing closure. Surely this is the case in classical and jazz and rock: Beethoven’s Fifth, Dexter Gordon’s “I’m a Fool to Want You,” The Beatles “A Day in the Life.” In her great book Rapture, the poet Susan Mitchell provides this arc of progression over and over─but with surprise side journeys and unexpected conclusions. Narrative poems can similarly make use of threads and turns and runnels that may circle back on themselves into something new. I think this symphonic quality can be an aspect of verse musicality.

With regards to the intersection of poetry and music, poets such as Langston Hughes or Kevin Young choose to write poems in song form (that is they choose to speak as the musician), while other poets speak to or about the musician.  Which do you find to be the most effective?  Why?

I’m not a musician. I can empathize up to a point. I don’t write songs, never have. So I wouldn’t try to create a poem as a song. What’s more, I don’t trust myself to be in the musician’s originary moment of creation. So I rarely if ever attempt to write about the musician composing the piece of music. It’s a matter of the poet’s particular imagination. TR Hummer is a terrific horn player and I think he can write from that point of view much more readily than I.

I do like writing about the song as its being played. I like imagining what the musician is feeling. I also like imagining what the conflict is, even when there are no lyrics. The title helps, of course. So I guess you could say that I prefer writing about the life situation being rendered by the music.

In the poem “Radio Fate,” you describe your boyhood experiences with listening to Jean Shepherd stories on the radio, and how the central characters in Shepherd’s stories received a flash of success followed by an imminent downfall.  It seems that the role of the radio during that time in the fifties and sixties was to provide a realistic look at ordinary Americans. How has radio changed since that time?  Today, what relationship do music and literature have with the radio?

I’m not sure I’m the best person to answer the first part of this question. Before the counterculture, yes, radio provided a look at ordinary Americans. In 1960, that same skinny ten year old I mentioned earlier used to listen to DJ Cousin Brucey of WABC playing the Four Seasons and the Four Tops and all those other groups. Those songs were about the usual heartaches involving love and romance. But when the counterculture emerged and FM radio became our radio choice, the songs became much more political and philosophical. College students drove the play list. The interests of the counterculture were wonderfully represented in music (though not as well in poetry). The songs were about personal freedom and personal choices in the context of war and race and much more.

Today there’s still great music about these subjects, but I think most downloads are purchased by teenagers, right? I may be in way over my head here, but radio and electronic delivery systems that guarantee your particular choice of style may be limiting what all people listen to… Not sure. I think it would be too facile to say that the increased obsession with celebrities has reduced our interest in what’s new artistically.

I do like the fact that you can hear poems on the radio and the internet. Garrison Keeler and Verse Daily and Poetry Daily and many other sites give us access to striking poems, sometimes even read aloud by the poets themselves. This is a good thing. But, ultimately, serious poetry, the kind that’s meant to be read on the page, is doing what it’s always been doing: striking out in search of effective, intriguing ways to render reality. Whether radio or the Internet gave it a voice or not, poets would continue on that search.

─Follow-up question: Currently, the songs we tend to hear on the radio have a very specific sound and construction, and because of this, we call them “popular.”  Is there a “popular” contemporary poetry?  What is it?  Why might it be so prevalent?

Great question. Clearly you’re a poet. You know how often we ask ourselves this kind of thing. Sides get taken. Manifestoes get written. Journals covertly criticize each other. Styles rear up and fall away. All of this is to the good. Poetry evolves. For fifty years, critics (who are usually poets as well) have worried about the so called “workshop poem.” The kind of thing that allegedly has no originality, that follows a script or formula, that seeks out common denominators rather than surprise.

There are, after all, undergraduate creative writing workshops in virtually every college in the country. And there are MFA programs in creative writing and now PhD programs in creative writing. Surely, some believe, these programs all teach the same thing! Not to mention, the same style! But, while there are plenty of similarities in what’s said, on the whole most programs advocate originality. I know absolutely that we do at Cal Poly─as well as at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at which I teach during summers. That’s why there is so much diversity of style today. Much more than, say, in the thirties and forties and early fifties.

Free verse still dominates, of course, but there are plenty of formalist poets. Maybe free verse is a prevalent choice because it provides so much elasticity of expression. I often write in syllabics myself. In fact, in the book I’m writing now, I’m working in a syllabical tercet that’s marked by visual caesurae.

Think of poets such as David St. John, Susan Mitchell, Norman Dubie, David Kirby, Gertrude Schnackenburg, Ruth Stone, Kevin Young, CD Wright, Peter Gizzi, Michael Palmer, Rae Armantrae, etc etc. These folks are stunning writers and yet they differ from each other quite a bit. Today’s poetry is loud and provocative and varied─and yet it does not “sound” like poems of earlier centuries, because speech itself changes over time.

“Whipping Post” is a poem about a near-death experience you have while driving with your son and listening to an Allman Brothers tune of the same name.  There, you juxtapose the song being played live in 1971 with the poet’s experience while listening to the song in 2004 all in the same moment.  The poem provides an effective place for that to happen.  Can you explain how you went about composing the poem regarding the collision of two separate moments in time? Where does music fit in to all of this?

About seven years ago, just after my son had earned his driver’s permit, we decided to drive roughly 200 miles to San Jose for an SAT practice session─and we thought some driving practice was in order as well. We spent the drive sharing cd’s with one another. He’d pick out a favorite song and then I’d pick out a favorite song, and we’d talk about why we liked them. Then along Highway 101, he drifted way too far to the left, cutting off another vehicle. It was scary but we survived without an accident.

I don’t usually do this, but I’d taken a laptop with me and while he was in class I drafted the poem in the hotel room. I had played “Whipping Post,” which, as most Duane Allman aficionados know, has the one of the greatest guitar solos in rock history. I love the song. It builds and builds as if it’s heading for some rock satori.

I knew I wanted to write about the song and our near accident. As soon as I sat down to write, Duane’s own vehicular death in a motorcycle crash and our very dangerous experience struck me as a parallel and the poem pretty much wrote itself. I played the song over and over in that hotel room and I went back and forth between the song and the moment of my son’s driving trouble. The poem’s cadence picks up something from the song’s rhythm. Tension builds and builds. Finally, we’re safe─but Duane’s death is a kind of haunting behind both.

“Accident Alert,” is the last poem in Self-Portrait with Expletives.  The epigraph reads: “Dexter Gordon’s ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’ plays for 1:23 — then fades out quickly.”  The poem ends with an aside: “‘I’m a Fool to Want You’ fades in from 2:53 to finish.”  The poet has a really intense sensory experience with the song.  As you have envisioned, in what way do you intend for the audience to experience the poem?  What role does the song play for you in the composition of the poem?  Why is it the final poem in the book? And why that song?

In “Accident Alert,” I tried imagine what it was like in the Blue Note recording studio in Englewood, New Jersey in 1965 when Dexter Gordon got together with Barry Harris (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass), Billy Higgins (drums), and of course Freddie Hubbard (trumpet). I tried to get in touch with Dexter, with that sax, so I could render what he’s rendering: What it feels like to be flat-out rejected by someone we love.

I can tell you that the song title fit thematically with my idea, but that would be nonsense. I chose “I’m a Fool…” because, quite simply, it’s my all time favorite sax song.

I also have a poem in the new book called “I’m Fine,” and it’s about being in the hospital with a possible pulmonary embolism. I don’t mention “I’m a Fool to Want You” or any other song in that poem, but, all alone one night on a hospital bed, after the TV was off, I listened to that song a few times on my headphones. I’d already been listening to the poem for years after my friend Mary Kay Harrington gave it to me. She and her gift appear in “Accident Alert” as one of the fortunate accidents.

“Accident Alert” came into being when the College of Liberal Arts at Cal Poly asked me to deliver a “last lecture” talk at Cal Poly. The idea was to imagine the last lecture of my career. What would I want to say to my students? I didn’t want the students simply to listen to a dry lecture; so, after a couple of truly awful passes, I wrote it out as a poem. I’m deeply, happily married, and my wife tells me she’s sticking around, thank god. But people heart-close to me have died, especially my father and Joe Ryan, the ex-priest in the poem. I felt that linking that sense of ineradicable loss to the question of writing might uncover something visceral. My writing group gave me a good deal of help with it, and, despite its length, the journal SOLO published it, for which I’m grateful.

When you write a poem, you don’t necessarily try to direct the reader’s feelings per se … Looking back from a distance, I realize I want the reader of this poem to experience that downright funereal sensation you get after the person you need is lost or gone forever. But I want something more than that, too.  Most elegies try to have some kind of comforting principal, and both the song and the poem are elegiac. I suppose I hope the reader feels all the sadness and comes out with some kind of sustaining motive to survive. In part, we survive by making art─which is, I think, an upbeat sentiment with which to close out a book.

MORE KEVIN CLARK

Get a copy of Self-Portrait with Expletives here.

Browse a broad list of Kevin Clark’s recommended reading here. This is a helpful resource for any poet, from beginner to professor. Clark provides several different categories of poetry and includes a short list of books under each.

Experience “Class Politics,” a poem from Self-Portrait with Expletives here. This poem was also published in RATTLE which is a wonderful print journal edited by Timothy Green. RATTLE also publishes several of the poems from their issues online.

Purchase Clark’s The Mind’s Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry here. This is a craft book, and according to Amazon, it is the only poetry writing textbook designed specifically for a college term. Again, this is another excellent tool for the beginning poet or the seasoned teacher.

Read another interview with Kevin Clark conducted by Glen Starkey of New Times here. Clark discusses Self-Portrait with Expletives, Lorca’s “duende,” and what winning the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry award means to him.

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Responding in Song: An Interview with The Autumn Film’s Dann Stockton

The conversation between creative mediums ebbs and flows. A poem replies to a painting, a song accompanies the visual imagery of a film, and a short story answers an opera. I recently interviewed Dann Stockton from the Boulder, Colorado based band, The Autumn Film, about the influence of literature on their song writing. The Autumn Film is comprised of Tifah Phillips, Dann Stockton, & Reid Phillips. The band formed in 2006 and their most recent full length album is The Ship and the Sea (http://theshipandthesea.com) which was released in 2010. Download their music at http://theautumnfilm.com/ and follow The Autumn Film on Twitter @theautumnfilm.

The following is an interview via an e-mail exchange from April 2011 between Dann Stockton and Crystal Hadidian

First, tell me about the band name. How did you pick that?

This is a funny story, actually. We were playing at a conference in the Rocky Mountains, and we had been going under the moniker ‘Tifah’ when we first started playing because Tifah had been singing by herself for a couple of years. We all wanted to be an “official” band, which required an actual band name. At the conference, we planned a day to spend as long as it took coming up with a good name and locking ourselves in our room until we came up with something we could all agree on. After 2-3 hours, we came up with “The Autumn Film” because, a)we liked how it sounded b) ‘Autumn’ is a season of change and inevitably loss, which is what a lot of our lyrics talk about, and  ‘Film’ is an artistic way to tell a story which we strive to do with our music. And c) The domain was available.

How has reading affected your creation of music and lyrics?

Reading sparks my imagination. Often I’ll try and put myself into the shoes of a character I’m reading about. Sometimes the imagery I get from reading helps set me in a creative direction that I can run with.

What are you currently reading?

I just recently finished reading (again) George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Lauren Hillenbrand’s, Unbroken. I love them both. Unbroken was especially fascinating and just an incredible story. Seabiscuit is on my short list to read next.

What book has been most influential in your song writing and approach to music?

I’d have to say C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Specifically in the Magician’s Nephew where Narnia is being sung into creation by Aslan. We are all  completely awestruck with the imagery of that scene. We make music, and it’s inherently creative, and we just love the idea of tying creation and melody together.

Are there any specific books that have influenced or inspired specific songs?

The one that immediately comes to mind is called The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. We haven’t released the song yet, but it’s a song about self-sacrifice and giving all of yourself to another person. That idea is powerful to the three of us, and I’d say it’s come up multiple times in our songs. We’re hoping to release this song and 7 others in the Summer of 2011.

Does this song explicitly refer to the Silverstein text in title or lyric, or only indirectly respond to the ideas?

I would say that its only responding to the idea that Silverstein laid out. The title is still tentative, but definitely inspired by what is talked about in his poem. We tried to step into both characters and write from the tree’s perspective.

Do you see the song as a re-iteration or re-telling of the book or a response beginning a conversation?

I think it’s our own take on the universal theme of self-sacrifice. Our highest hope is that it would spark conversation and compel people to relate to it, and think about themselves and their loved ones.

When did your song “Roll over me” air on One Tree Hill? Although I wouldn’t compare anything on T.V. to literature, it is a type of currently popular storytelling. What are your thoughts on how songs accompany or strengthen the narrative in that medium?

“Roll Over Me” aired in November, 2010 on One Tree Hill. We are actually really humbled and thankful that a music supervisor decided to pair our music to their narrative. I think in a lot of ways music enhances the story being told on screen. Matching the general feeling of a particular song to a story that’s already in progress – within the medium of TV, that likely has a lot of back story – is a tough job. I love when someone does that well. Television, just like any other medium, can be used to move people and tell a worthwhile story.

How do you view the relationship between popular music and contemporary literature?

It’s unfortunate, but I feel like it’s almost non-existent. There are still a few great songwriters who are influenced by great literature, but in general, popular music has taken a completely independent journey that I would be surprised to find is in any way influenced by any type of literature.

Do you have any other thoughts regarding the intersection of music and literature?

I wish there was more of it. There is increasingly more and more meaningless music which is disappointing because there’s such a vast array of wonderful literary thinkers from which an endless amount of inspiration could be cultivated, if artists were more willing to acknowledge it.

Happy Accidents: An Interview with Poet David Kirby

David Kirby’s poems will put you and your imagination on a jet plane and fly you both around the world. They’ll take you to Italy and France or into conversations with Jesus and Elvis.  They’ll even force all of you serious critics to crack a smile. David Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement of London as a “hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” Kirby’s latest book of poetry is Talking About Movies With Jesus, and he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. See also www.davidkirby.com.

The following is an interview via email April 2011 between Ephraim Scott Sommers and David Kirby.

As you understand it, what is the relationship between popular music and contemporary literature?

Relation between music and poetry? There is no relation, unless you want there to be. Anything can cause a poem to be written, and I bet there are a lot of fabulous poets out there who are completely tone deaf. Paintings can trigger poems, heartbreak, other poems: anything goes, and every poet has a different strategy to get the job done.

That said, music and writing are sure tied together in my mind, probably because pacing and rhythm are keys to both. If you’ve ever heard my friend and colleague Robert Olen Butler read his fiction, you know how important a musical sense is, an awareness that it’s not just the best words in the best order but also the best rhythm as they roll out onto the page.

You probably know that Howard Nemerov said a poem is like a joke; either you get the joke or you don’t, and the same is true for poems, and, since we’re talking about music here, songs. I don’t mean that the poem or song is crystal clear in its meaning the way a stop sign or a cross is; I mean there’s a level of comfort and familiarity, that you like what you have and you want to spend more time with it. But you have to get it first: you don’t jump up in row H during a pop concert and say, “Stop – I don’t get it!”

And one more thing. There’s a compositional similarity between music and poetry. You ever watch a great guitarist improvise? It seems random, and then you notice they’re working within a tight grid: certain strings (but not others) between the fifth and the seventh fret, for example. Same in the free-verse poetry that most people are writing these days: you can do anything you want, but you’re going to have the most luck if you choose from among the dozens of time-tested techniques poets have always used.

What kind of music have you been enjoying lately?  Other than those musicians you’ve written about directly, what music has influenced your poetry?

I’ve been listening to a lot of different kinds, but then I always have. I try to support live music as much as possible, and recently I’ve been to every kind of concert from classical to the Kronos Quartet to soul reviver Sharon Jones. In my car CD player there’s, let’s see . . . Hall and Oates, the J. Geils Band, Son House, and a newer group, Lost in the Trees, whom I also saw in a riveting stage show recently. This morning I listened to a lot of classical music as I drove out to a church in the country, where I and five other guitarists played Bach and a Japanese folk song.

So I like it all, and all of it has influenced me. There aren’t a whole lot of one-to-one correlations of the now-I’m-going-to-write-the-way-Debussy-sounds type, but when I write poems, I pay attention to the highs and lows, the sound quality, the refrains, the pace, the tempo – pretty much everything you try to put in a good song.

The internet has affected the music industry in a colossal way, and many musicians are upset by this.  In your opinion, is the internet a good thing for poetry?

Oh, yeah, sure: you can look stuff up, swap poems with folks, do a million things you couldn’t do twenty years ago, when, for all the advances that had been made, reading and writing were closer technologically to what went on in Chaucer’s time than what you see today.

Musically, the internet makes access almost magical. But I hate what’s happened to record stores and even the music sections of stores like Borders. Serendipity’s gone: you can’t go looking for a Del-Tones record and say, “Whoa – Del Shannon! I forgot all about him!” There are no more happy accidents of discovery, and no more listening stations for you to listen to those happy accidents on.

So thank god for Amoeba Music! Then again, how often is an East Coast boy going to find himself on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley?

When you compose, is there music playing in the background?  What is it?  If not, why not?

Oh, hell, no! That’d be like imposing a basketball game on top of an opera on your TV set; somebody would say, “Who’s winning?” and you’d say, “Um, I don’t know – Tosca?” If the music’s good, you can’t resist, and same thing if the poem’s going well. No, you got to keep them separate.

How would you define a “good” song?  How is that different or similar to the way you define a “good” poem?

It’s not easy to say, is it? Nor should it be: cultural criticism of every kind is a conversation rather than a judgment; if I can persuade you that something is worth reading or listening to and you do it and agree, then I’ve done my job, and if I can’t, that’s my fault, not the work’s.

I wrote a book of essays called Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation in which I argue that anything we consider good has to pass three tests: it has to be admired by the elite, it has to be embraced by the masses as well, and it has to do this over time. That’s how we know Van Gogh is good, for example; an art professor will tell you so, but an inner-city kid will say the same, and that’s been going on for decades, so Van Gogh must be doing something right.

Your new book, Talking about Movies with Jesus, is filled with poems that dip and dive in several different directions imaginatively.  How might the narrative construction of your poems resemble a musical composition?  Can you think of a specific song it might resemble?

Hey, you make me sound like Frank Zappa! So pardon me if I stop for a brief sniffle and to say I’m not worthy. There, that’s out of the way, so let’s get back to the question.

When I was maybe fourteen years old, my older brother was a beatnik, or at least as much of a beatnik as you could be in Baton Rouge. He had a lot of jazz LPs, and I remember trying to understand what I then thought of as the ugly parts of the music, the often violent changes in key and tempo. Even though they were ugly, I liked them. What I finally realized is that art that’s smooth and beautiful can get boring pretty quickly; later I learned that Edmund Burke made a distinction between the merely beautiful and the sublime, which was beyond beautiful because it contained something frightening as well, maybe even evil.

So I’m happy put lots of swerves and zigzags in my poems; what you get is less of a slow tram ride down the mountain but a lot of tumbling and cartwheeling, and if you land in a crevasse, I try to make it possible for you to scramble out again. Am I switching metaphors here? Hey, it pays the bills at my house! Anyway, in a musical sense, there may be more jazz in my writing than pure rock, which is why I mention Zappa.

Did Bo Diddley really shake you down for money at the induction ceremony to the Florida Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Ephraim, what does it say about me that I let you talk to me this way? Of course he did! Can’t you tell those stories are true? Too many good things happen to me for me to make things up. Of course, sometimes my wife, the sublime poet Barbara Hamby, will accuse me of trying to make things happen. (“It’s okay if we get arrested; at least I’ll get a poem out of it!”) But, yeah, it’s all true.

There seems to be two different ideas of music working throughout your book.  In the poem “Big Man’s Got the Blues,” you point out, “Maybe Big Man’s// been listening to too much Otis and too little/ Little Richard.”  You continue, “Little Richard is all gimmick—all trickeration.”  How would you define the difference between the music of gimmick and the music of soul?  How might this idea of gimmick be applicable to contemporary poetry?

What starts as a gimmick can turn into something soulful. Come to think of it, it probably doesn’t work to say that you’re going to do something soulful; that’s like announcing that you’re getting ready to be smart or beautiful. You try something, mess with it, see what other people think, forget it, find it again, combine it with something else, and, pow, entire audiences are falling at your feet.

Notice that, in that same poem, I quote Diane Arbus as saying, “What if we couldn’t always tell a trick from a miracle?” So it doesn’t matter how you begin; it’s where you end up that counts.

I like to tell my students that art is the deliberate transformed by the accidental; you make your plan and set out all full of ambition and caffeine, and then something unexpected happens. One minute, you were practicing a card trick, and the next, you’re feeding loaves and fishes to the multitude.

The aptly named poem “These Arms of Mine” outlines an imaginative experience that the poet has with the gut-busting Otis Redding tune of the same name.  There, the author becomes the singer in that the poem ends with the poet crooning the lyrics from Redding’s song.  There, music and the poetry become unified.  What is the significance of this?  Is it that the singer is speaking for the writer in some way?  Why Otis Redding?

If the gods said, okay, you get to steal anybody’s stuff, who wouldn’t want to steal Otis’s? Besides, the gods don’t have to give us permission. Steal, brothers and sisters, but steal the best.

Your last book was titled Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Continuum, 2009).  You seem to have an affinity for the man responsible for “Tutti-Frutti,” and so much so that your new book begins with the poem “Talking about Jesus with Little Richard.”  In that poem, you go to a Little Richard show and find yourself wondering what the musician keeps in a small black bag.  When you finally get near the black bag, you write, “Up close, it looks a lot more ordinary than it had/ before.”  Can the same be said for artists who achieve stardom? 

Oh, yes, absolutely. I’ve met a bunch of them, and they all have that carapace of stardom wrapped around them, but if you say the right thing, suddenly they’re your next-door neighbor. One tip: if you’re talking to a woman in show biz and you know her kids’ names, ask how they’re doing. Every woman likes to brag about her kids. Of course, if her kids are in rehab. . . .

As the poem ends, you make the promise to Jesus ironically to “stay close” to Little Richard, and you write in the penultimate line, “I will know him.”  “Talking about Jesus with Little Richard” focuses on the musician himself and not on the music the musician makes.  Why is that?  Why must the poet really “know him?”   

I didn’t really mean know as in personally or socially; I meant knowing a great person, an influence, as completely and totally as possible. What’s the best part of this person? What’s the worst? Really, what makes him or her tick? Because that brings us back to theft: just as you can steal an artist’s moves, you can also model yourself on the parts of that person that made him or her an artist in the first place.

In Richard’s case, it’s understanding how he grow up poor and black and crippled and gay in a little town nobody ever heard of and how he both built on and abandoned all that to become somebody who changed the world. When you understand Richard’s hunger and ambition and, mainly, his ability to adapt himself to his circumstances, you learn things you yourself can use.

Of course, you can only learn so much. Everyone is unknowable, and the monsters of our cultures are even less knowable than the rest of us. I mean “monster” in a positive sense, of course, in the way that Napoleon and Beethoven are monsters, that is, a whole hell of a lot bigger and more complicated than you and me. In the end, we can’t know them. But we have to try.

I imagine you have seen many bands, both good and bad, play live.  When I saw you read at San Diego State University in March of 2011, you charged the audience with emotion and laughter, something which doesn’t often happen at a typical poetry reading.  What advice can you give to beginning poets about how they might deliver a memorable poetry performance?  How might a poetry performance be similar to a live concert?

Thank you – oh, man, you’re slinging the compliments like an out-of-town businessman in a singles bar!

The main thing you have to realize is that poetry reading is show biz. It’s not an Aerosmith concert, but twenty or a hundred people have come to see you when they could have been doing something else, so you should entertain them. That doesn’t mean you act silly or do slapstick; it means you give them a good show.

So a couple of things. One is to set the reading up like a concert. Start big! Hit them with something high-energy. Keep that up for two or three poems, and then you can segue into the slow stuff – this would be the part of a concert where the lead singer might do some acoustic ballads, say. Here, remember to slow down. The silences are just as important as the words. A writer like Bob Butler or a singer like Otis Redding will make you wait, make you want it. Give your audience time to feel their hearts break, to feel them come back together again. Then speed up! Setting and changing tempo will keep your listeners listening.

The second thing is rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. When bluesman Big Bill Broonzy was on the road in the sixties, there weren’t many hotels that took black guests, so he stayed with promoters. Bill loved kids (and vice versa), and he’d always sing them to sleep. But the amazing thing is that he’d rehearse: he’d always go to his room and go over the songs he was going to sing, even though his audience consisted of a single three year-old.

I read to an audience of two people once, and on a couple of occasions, I’ve read to eight hundred. Doesn’t matter if there’s ten or a thousand of you, though; you get the same show.

MORE DAVID KIRBY

Buy Talking about Movies with Jesus here at the Louisiana State University Press website.  The site also contains a short description of the book and a short author biography. Customers also have the choice of buying either a CLOTH or PAPER copy of the collection.

Enjoy the poem “Talking about Jesus with Little Richard” here at Poetry Daily. This is the first poem in Talking about Movies with Jesus and is referenced in two of the questions above.

Find a full publication list and a list of honors and awards Kirby has received here at his Florida State University Department Faculty page.

Read an article about Kirby’s life as a poet here. In it, Kirby discusses traveling and the business side of poetry.

Examine the New York Times archives page for other articles written by David Kirby here.

The Art That Sings to Hurt You: An Interview with Poet Jericho Brown

The best kind of art should make us uncomfortable, but it should also give us a pleasing experience aesthetically.  Recently, I had a very interesting conversation with Jericho Brown on poetry, jazz, music, Prince, sexuality, and Janis Joplin, among other topics.

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Oxford American, A Public Space, and 100 Best African American Poems.  His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award.  See also www.jerichobrown.com.

The following is an interview via email April 2011 between Ephraim Scott Sommers and Jericho Brown.

How do you view the relationship between popular music and contemporary literature?

I’ve always wanted to see Wanda Coleman read and finally got the chance to do so a few days ago in Los Angeles.  The experience was just as wonderful as I had expected, and after the reading, there was a Q&A.  She answered one of the questions, “Art feeds art.”  That about sums what I think of the relationship between popular music and contemporary literature.

When I first read this question, I started thinking about a recent argument I had with the poet Tyehimba Jess about whether or not Prince is/was a pop star.  Jess is a good friend and a great poet and a musician too, but he was quite upset that I thought of Prince as a pop star.  He kept telling me all this stuff about Prince’s talents and skills and abilities as a musician as if any of that stopped Prince from being a pop star.  (I’m not sure why our category making minds don’t like for people to be too many things at one time.)  I think he didn’t want to believe that people like Stevie Wonder and Prince and Muddy Waters could ever share the same title as someone like Britney Spears because those first three artists have a lot to do with how he thinks about his own work, and I’m willing to bet you couldn’t convince him that someone like Spears is thinking about artistry as much as she is about how to sell records; and of course, that may be true in the case of Spears.  Believe it or not, the Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout is a big fan of Lady Gaga, and I don’t think she’d ever deny that listening to the singer’s lyrics doesn’t have some effect on her own juxtapositions.

At any rate, I listened to Prince’s Purple Rain over and over when I was trying to figure out how to put the poems in Please in an order that would help to make them sing off of the page.  I needed a model of genius to create what I wanted to be a work of genius.  Nothing wrong with having the biggest goal possible.

Langston Hughes saw the possibilities for poetry modeled after jazz and blues at a time when many black intellectuals and artists were ashamed to admit in public that they enjoyed listening to the blues.  I don’t know that things have changed much in the larger scheme of American poetry.  Black writers are more likely these days to admit their influences are pop musicians, but others still have a lot of shame about this or don’t realize it’s the case.

What music have you been enjoying lately?  What music specifically has influenced your writing? How?

Shirlette and the Dynamite Brothers lately: http://mosadimusic.com/wordpress/.  They bad and can’t be categorized as nothing but good.

I’ve also be listening to some live Eva Cassidy too, a little bit of Kem when I get the chance to make love, and yes, guilty pleasure or not, I’m one of those fools convinced that Lil Wayne is the real thing.  Most of this will probably stop now that you’ve asked me though.  I don’t like knowing that I’m listening to music.  That takes the fun out of it for me, and I can’t notice things in a song if I’m trying to hear them.

I’m mostly a fool for women singers with limited voices.  It’s more fun for me to hear how Mary J. Blige or Diana Ross manage to relate an emotion when they do it well than it is for me to hear Chaka Khan or Aretha Franklin do so.  Don’t get me wrong.  I ain’t stupid.  I know Khan and Franklin can sang, but there’s little mystery to that for me.

I’m trying to think whether or not there’s a music that hasn’t influenced my writing.  Maybe I could say classical music hasn’t, but then I guess it wouldn’t really be classical music if that was true, and I have been known to be sappy enough to put Renee Fleming on when I feeling for purity and cleanliness and how they are or are not useful.  With as far as sampling goes at this point, though, I can’t say there is a music that hasn’t influenced the way I think about my own work as an artist.

My favorite songwriters of all time are Stevie Wonder and Ashford & Simpson.  Wonder’s music always makes me feel my insides and everything A&S work on makes me feel my skin.

I will say this about how music influences my writing:  musicians and singers, even the ones who ain’t all that good at it, always look completely confident while they are doing it.  My favorite thing to see is how a singer runs out on stage just before opening his or her mouth.  The footage of the band or the lead standing around like nothing is about to happen or even arguing right before a show excites the fuck out of me.  I can never believe those few moments are real ones, and I have to feel the way they must feel when I’m in the process of writing.  I have to believe what I’m doing is what should be done just the way I’m doing it and that everything I need to get it done is within me.

There are about 297 other ways music influences my writing, but this answer is pretty long as it is, and talking about this kind of thing is much more fun than typing it.

What are your thoughts about the relationship of music and poetry over time? Is there any particular combination of song and text that you would like to highlight/mention, have been inspired by?

I think I already got at the first part of this in my last answer.   Here’s a poem that’s pretty popular by Michael Harper that was and still is of great use to me:

Dear John, Dear Coltrane

a love supreme, a love supreme

a love supreme, a love supreme

Sex fingers toes

in the marketplace

near your father’s church

in Hamlet, North Carolina—

witness to this love

in this calm fallow

of these minds,

there is no substitute for pain:

genitals gone or going,

seed burned out,

you tuck the roots in the earth,

turn back, and move

by river through the swamps,

singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;

what does it all mean?

Loss, so great each black

woman expects your failure

in mute change, the seed gone.

You plod up into the electric city—

your song now crystal and

the blues. You pick up the horn

with some will and blow

into the freezing night:

a love supreme, a love supreme—

Dawn comes and you cook

up the thick sin ‘tween

impotence and death, fuel

the tenor sax cannibal

heart, genitals, and sweat

that makes you clean—

a love supreme, a love supreme—

Why you so black?

cause I am

why you so funky?

cause I am

why you so black?

cause I am

why you so sweet?

cause I am

why you so black?

cause I am

a love supreme, a love supreme:

So sick

you couldn’t play Naima,

so flat we ached

for song you’d concealed

with your own blood,

your diseased liver gave

out its purity,

the inflated heart

pumps out, the tenor kiss,

tenor love:

a love supreme, a love supreme—

a love supreme, a love supreme—

Everything about this poem seems so sudden to me, so completely uncharacteristic of the stereotypical sounds and images nonreaders of poetry often expect from the genre, and I think that has everything to do with the ways the poem’s form and word choice inform its content.  It really is a jazz poem because it is aware of the power of improvisation.  This poem, like good jazz, is always aware of and capable of going back to or hinting at pattern while leaping into variation.  More than that, it gives me something to chant to myself when ever I feel like I’ve done something right on this planet, ie:

Why you so black?

cause I am

why you so funky?

cause I am

why you so black?

cause I am

why you so sweet?

cause I am

why you so black?

cause I am

a love supreme, a love supreme

Poetry is a form of art that is often compared to music, how would you describe the “musical quality” of a poem as you understand it?   

A lot of people don’t like my answer to this, but it’s still my answer.  A reader should be able to hum along to the poem and able to sing the words of the poem aloud as if it is set to music.  The poem itself should tell the reader the melody of itself by way of its combination of words.  Yes, I believe this to be the case with free verse poems as much as formal ones.

When you sit down to write, do you mostly compose with this “music” of a poem in mind, or do you pay more attention to things like narrative thread, image, and tone? 

Narrative and image are quite important to me as a poet writing in the African American literary tradition, but I usually figure the “story” of a poem out after I’m much more fully aware of its sound(s).  I don’t think I know the difference between the music of a poem and the tone of the poem.  I think the music of the poem is what makes for the tone of the poem.

A few poets, such as Langston Hughes, Kevin Young and yourself, write poems that are in song form while others write poems that speak in some way to a piece of music or a specific musician.  Which do you find more effective?  Why? 

It’s more effective for each poet to do his or her own thing.  Poets should seek out work that turns them on and write the poems they wish to read but can’t seem to find anywhere.  Poems about music as a subject and/or poems that take music on as a form have the same goal:  an emotional reaction from the reader.  We are here to move people.  Beauty is moving.  Don’t you feel moved when you see somebody fine?  And you either talk or regret not having the guts to do so when she’s gone.  That reaction is how the reader knows we did what we were supposed to do.

Throughout your book Please, there are track titles and section titles that would mirror what the reader might see on an album.  As you have envisioned, how are the readers meant to experience Please as a piece of music or as an album?  Please explain.

I wanted a sense of what I mention in the previous answer as an upfront admission about my poetry and my poetics.  I know that people are okay with going to music to be moved, and I wanted to foreground this as my intention.

There is a love/hate relationship between a musician and his/her instrument.  The musicians you seem to focus on in your book Please are singers, why is that?

First, I grew up in church choirs and never learned to play anything but my lungs and my throat.  My sister got piano lessons, but I wasn’t allowed the same because my parents were afraid learning piano would make me gay.  (Guess I showed them.)

Also, I thought there would be more resonances with voices since we understand that poems have to have voice and speakers.  I thought that the hate part of the love/hate relationship you mention would be more interesting if the instrument indeed becomes the self or the self’s body.

In “Track 5: Summertime,” you take on the persona of Janis Joplin, that is, the poet becomes the singer and speaks through her.  Could you explain why you chose to speak as the singer rather than to the singer, and why Janis?

If I were to speak to Joplin, I’d be saying all kinds of things she’d like that hearers outside of our relationship might find absolutely inappropriate.  Even though we may sit and listen to the same song at the same time by her, my Janis and what we do ain’t nothing like your Janis and what you do.

I chose to speak as Joplin because I know we have a lot in common, and I know a good bit of her biography.

In “Pause,” you write, “I want to ask/ If they ever heard of slavery,/ The work song—the best music/ Is made of subtraction,/ The singer seeks an exit from the scarred body/ And opens his mouth/ Trying to get out” (10-16).  The singers throughout Please seem to be scarred or hurt into music in some way.  By the same degree, can it be said then that your book Please as a whole is a kind of blues or “work song,” where the poet seeks the same kind of escape?  Does poetry work in the same way? 

I’m so glad you can read, Ephraim.  And you asking me this just made me feel like I really can write.  I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of people review Please, but few have made note of this aspect of the volume as directly as your question does.

Reading good poetry is indeed an escape for me, or I should say, after I’ve read a really good poem, I have to remember that the world it created for me isn’t the one in which my literal and physical body was.

Well, if reading a good poem is like running away from home, for me, writing poetry is like walking a nicely populated nude beach on Mars.  I should capitalize NICELY.

We’ve been talking about the intersection of poetry and music.  The first poem in Please, titled “Track 1: Lush Life,” speaks to the relationship between the listener and the singer.  In that poem, the music triggers a memory of pain in the listener, a pain that is shared.  Does this say something about the art we gravitate toward, that we actually seek it out because it hurts us?  As you see it, what kind of music is the kind that “sings to hurt you” (1)?  Is it soul music?  Is it blues?  Why might listeners or readers “drive to the center of town/ To be whipped by a woman’s voice” (3-4)?

I’ve been arguing about the pain of pleasure with my students lately and can’t seem to get them to admit that, while pain can be felt without pleasure, there is no way to feel pleasure without pain.  Since I haven’t convinced them, I’m starting to second guess myself, but up until recently, I was pretty sure that desire is based on not having a thing and the realization of not having it hurts like hell until you get it.  The opposite is also true, that we experience pleasure with some idea that we can and/or will lose it.

Do you like that Michael Harper poem?  If you started liking at the first few lines, you probably wondered at some point whether or not it was going to make a misstep.  If you don’t like that poem, you read it thinking about the poems you do like and how much you’d rather be reading those.  Of course, you like that poem because you’ve already proven yourself a good reader in this conversation we’re having.

Even Mary Oliver’s most inspirational poems seek the need in us to be and remain inspired.  All good art means to hurt you in order to please and/or convince you.

MORE JERICHO BROWN

Purchase Please at Small Press Distribution here.

Find out what famous poet Mark Doty says about Please here. This site also offers comments and/or reviews on a wide range of poets and poetry.

Read “The Gulf,” a poem from Please, at Verse Daily here. This site posts one poem per day from a wide range of poetic sources.

See how Missy McEwan feels about Please here.  This site contains several blog posts about different aspects of a writer’s life.

Dig deeper into Jericho Brown’s biography and enjoy three of his poems here.  Poets.org is a popular poetry resource for any scholar looking to begin research on a poet’s work.

Silence and Sound: An Interview with Poet, Barry Spacks

Barry Spacks was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara and held that title from 2005-2007. Prior to the official recognition, he already maintained an important role in the local Santa Barbara poetry community. Spacks has published novels, short stories, and ten collections of poems, including Regarding Women which was the winner of the Cherry Grove Collections Prize and The Hope of Air, published by Michigan State University Press in 2004. In addition to teaching Literature at M.I.T.,  Spacks was a N.E.A librettist grantee, won the St. Botolph’s Arts Award, Boston, and is a Senior Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism) student of H.E. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. He currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the College of Creative Studies.

Forthcoming from Cherry Grove Collections in 2012 is A Bounty of 84s, a selection from an e-mail exchange over ten years using an invented short form. Of the collaboration with Lawrence E. Leone, a divorce lawyer in Santa Monica, Spacks says “we claim it as perhaps the first strictly cyber poetic form.” The form is in reference “to the Buddha’s having left – it’s said – 84,000 different teachings as a recognition of the variety of human types.” See also www.barryspacks.net for more information about Spack’s writings and visual art.

The following is an interview via e-mail in April 2011 between Barry Spacks and Crystal Hadidian.

What is your perspective on how your work engages with music?

I’ve always been a singer, since earliest boyhood, and I take the “lilt” of poetic speech as the crucial aspect of poetry to “get right” in composition, tweaking toward a desired beat endlessly. Word-music is central for me, and difficult.

How would you describe the role of sound in your own poetry? Do you compose with the “music” of a poem in mind, or do you pay more attention to things like narrative thread and image? 

Art in language work — in all genres, of course — must have distinction, fresh offering, and the music of poetry I see as a most subtle engagement with the reader. Story, imagery, these come right at us, while the swell and wane of the music of line and line-through are more an ambiance, a crucial alembic.

Is there any particular piece of music that has influenced your work as a whole?

Yes, come to think of it, Bach’s Brandenbergs, which were the repeat-music of my undergraduate days and meant “art” to me when I first came into discovery mode.

That’s a very interesting term.  What does  “discovery mode” mean to you?

As with others who might have been the first in their 2nd generation immigrant families to go to college (much less graduate from high school) I had the world of books and culture, history and politics opened to me when I reached the University of Pennsylvania at age 17.

I know that when you read “Dream Poem” from The Hope of Air at a reading, you imitate Morgan Freeman’s voice for the appropriate sections. What are you thoughts regarding the poem on the page verses the experience of hearing the poem performed by the poet?

 Sweet of you to remember that, Crystal! Like most poets, I believe, the poem aloud is the ideal medium. We’re nourished by the sensibility of the poet on the page, and how much more fully when she’s there in her fullness offering work that no one is likely to more fully understand.

That makes me think of the contrast between a produced record and a live concert. Do you see the poet as more of a performer, or entertainer rather than simply a writer reading? 

Certainly I’m at my best performing, getting the piece across, understanding the hell out of it. These days of heightened visual and auditory focus more and more poetry seeks performance for fullest connection.
Another poem I really enjoy from The Hope of Air is “Buddha Songs.” The lines “What’s loveable about a hum? / Needlessness. It stops, or continues” suggest an unfettered relationship with sound, lacking the modern desperation for constant background noise. Would you apply this same idea to music, or keep it primarily connected with that single image of a hum? Since we’re talking about sound and music, what is the role of its opposite – silence – in your work?

My key title on a recent poem is “Words About Silence.” I’ve even considered using those words as the title of the next collection. Silence stands for the Ultimate; the words are fingers pointing to the moon.

How do you view the relationship between popular music and contemporary literature?

Popular music — take my guys, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, my passions, Billie Holiday and Gillian Welch — is wildly inventive as practiced by the greats. Paul Simon, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Conor Oburst, these gifted creators show the way toward the new in feeling and originality. It’s all about contained risk, for which the music provides model and inspiration.

 How have you pursued this “contained risk” in your own work?

Absolutely. Sheer risk tends toward incoherence, hence the constraining word “contained” – one speaks out, reveals, knowing that those who merely sit in judgment will smugly sniff at times, condescend from the safety of their personal silence. Artists are condemned to reveal; craft and talent allow the personal to come across as “works.”

What are your thoughts on contemporary song lyrics and the decline of younger generations reading poetry?

Well, it seems to me the great loss is the capacity to read altogether. The satisfaction in reading comes more slowly, communing with the poem or story as it brings up a surge of commonality with the provocative source. The emotion in popular music comes with a rush. Addicts exclusively of the stuff – wonderful as it is – are junkies with little interest in meat & potatoes.

The Sound of Story: An Interview with Poet, Chris Baron

Chris Baron was born into the tumultuous life of an artist’s family in New York City. As described in his poem, “Field Trip,” he was introduced to the power of many creative mediums at a young age: “stunned by a wave of Mozart, / toxic smells of oils and cigarette / smoke.” Later in the poem, the mother/artist “spins like a whirlwind, consumes / everything with brush strokes.” The artist “consumes” experiences and responds. Chris is passionate about the importance of art as a practical resource for discovering truth and as a means of survival in our every day lives.

Chris completed his M.F.A. in Poetry at San Diego State University in 1998 and is currently a Professor of English at San Diego City College. He has been a prominent part of the Border Voices Poetry Project and many other local San Diego literary endeavors. Forthcoming from City Works Press in 2012 is (tentatively titled) The Four Graces, which will highlight the work of Chris along with Cali Linfor, Sabrina Youmans, Heather Eudy. Also in 2012, This Time Not Alone will be released, an artist’s book of poetry and artwork with collaborator Randall Hasson.

The following interview took place via e-mail between Chris Baron and Crystal Hadidian in April 2011.

What is your perspective on how your work engages with music?

My works tries to tell a story in a musical way.  This is why I love poetry—I love story, and I love sound.  I want to remember the way something is told almost as much as the something itself.  Poetry provides all the practical tools to this.  When these tools build and deliver the story—then boom.

How would you describe the role of sound in your own poetry? Do you compose with the “music” of a poem in mind, or do you pay more attention to things like narrative thread and image?

I start with narrative and image, and the sound is natural.  Revision is key for me, so sometimes I pound it out to get the story down, and then I bring in the music.

Is there any particular piece of music that has influenced your work as a whole?

It’s hard to say—I am the guy who has James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer as a station on Pandora. Perhaps I see life a little bit too seriously?  I like music that tells stories.

Do you have a favorite poem you wrote that was ekphrastic?

So many of my poems are like this. In my M.F.A. thesis, there are many poems about growing up in an artist’s home. Some of the poems are about the challenges of an environment where nude women were present. I have also written some poems about the paintings themselves and how they have in some ways haunted and inspired me.

What are your thoughts on contemporary song lyrics and the the role of music and literature in the lives of your students?

This is so key for my students. Their favorite assignment is when I let them bring in a song, present it to the class, and then they get to discuss—using their new found lexicon and understanding about poetry, to explain how their favorite song is poetry.  Through a simple assignment like this one, students can start to make educated judgments about what might and might not be literature in the same way that they more easily might talk about what is or is not good music.

As for lyrics…music has it easy. The music of instruments is far more powerful in an immediate sense than any words, so you can say something like, “you know that I could use somebody” which is a good lie, and follow it up with a total of 19 other words in total, and if you put some solid music behind it, and you sing it with passion, then you got it!  Literature needs to work much harder (not that it is harder to do).

How do you view the relationship between popular music and contemporary literature?

Both explore the deep conditions of humanity—lust, love, greed, desire, hope, fear, life and death.  Literature is the longer version and exploration of what a song is trying to say for you.